Blender offers a number of tools to change the default bones. To access the toolbar, switch over to the editing mode in Blender, which can be changed by hitting the Tab key on your keyboard or by simply selecting “Edit Mode” from the drop-down list in the top-left corner of the 3D Viewport.

The tools available are the following:

• Select: Selects a bone or bone parts
• Move: Selects parts and moves them by dragging with the left mouse button (this can also be done by grabbing (hotkey ‘G’) the selected part and moving it to the required location
• Rotate: Rotates the selected parts around the X-, Y-, or Z-axes
• Scale: Scales the selected parts by dragging using the left mouse button
• Transform: Changes an object’s translation, rotation, or scale
• Annotate: Makes annotations around an object
• Measure: Measures the distances between objects or object parts
• Roll: Rotates a bone around the Y-axis
• Bone size: Changes a bone’s thickness relative to its length
• Extrude: Creates a new bone that will be connected to the selected bone
• Shear: Shears the selected parts horizontally

Now, let’s see the steps to add bones in Blender!

To add bones in Blender, we need to be in Object mode, which can be changed by hitting the Tab key or by selecting “Object Mode” from the drop-down list.

After switching over to Object mode:

1. Type “Shift+A” to open the Add menu.
2. Click on “Armature” and a single bone will be added to the scene.

For the next step, we need to switch back to Edit mode (hit the Tab key). For demonstration, we’ve used an arm file from Free3D. After switching over to Edit mode:

1. Hit ‘A’ on the keyboard to select the whole bone.
2. Hit ‘R’ to rotate the bone and ‘G’ to grab it, then use the mouse to move the bone to align it with the model (in this case, the lower arm) as accurately as possible. The tools in the Toolbar can also be used to make changes to the bone.

After aligning the bone to the model, stay in Edit mode to extrude the bone:

1. Click on the bone, and hit ‘E’ on the keyboard.
2. A new bone connected to the previous bone will be added, which can be scaled and aligned to the upper arm of the model.
3. Similarly, the lower arm bone can be extruded more times to make fingers, and these smaller bones can be aligned to the model’s fingers.
4. You can also select each extruded bone individually and hit the space bar to scale it according to the model.

A unit bone structure of the whole arm has now been made!

For complex models, a lot of bones can be involved, so it can become confusing while rigging to know what bone you want to change. Thus, categorization and renaming of the bones is always a good idea, if not essential! To do so, staying in Edit mode:

1. Click on the bone that you want to rename.
2. Go to the outliner (the section of the screen that displays all the objects present in the screen as a list on the top right side of the 3D Viewport).
3. Double click on the highlighted bone to rename it.
4. Different bones can be categorized by right-clicking on a bone in the outliner and selecting “New Collection” from the menu. This will create a new collection and add the selected bone to it. You can then add more bones to this or other collections.

After following the above steps, switch back to Object mode, and follow the steps below:

1. Select the model and the full armature by hitting ‘A’ on the keyboard.
2. Type “Ctrl+P” to “Parent” the objects.
3. Select “With Automatic Weights” under the “Set Parent To” menu.

You’ve now successfully added bones to your model in Blender!

Adding bones can be a little tricky, so here are some hints:

• Locking: Users can “lock” bones to prevent any accidental changes while working on other bones. To lock a bone, in Edit mode, hit “Shift+W” and select “Lock”. The lock can be disabled by expanding the “Context Collection Boolean Set” which pops up after locking the bone, and then clicking “Disable” under “Type”.
• Duplicate: A bone or a connection of bones can be duplicated in Blender, which can be very useful if a model has two of the same parts (like arms). Instead of making and editing bones twice or more, simply duplicate the selected bones in Edit mode. Hit “Shift+D” and the selected bones will now be duplicated and can be moved and aligned with the model.
• Mirroring: While character modeling, or even with symmetrical models, there’s no need to make every single bone. In fact, you can create bones for half of a model and simply mirror them. To do so, you need to be in Edit mode and select the bones to be mirrored. Right-click to open the “Armature Context Menu” and hover over the “Mirror” option. Here, select the axis along which you want the bones to be mirrored.

Here are some resources related to adding bones for you to refer to:

• Blender’s online manual has reference materials about every function. It also has a downloadable reference manual on the home page.
• Wikibooks also offers material about Blender functions, sparing no detail.
• Reddit has answers to everything. Answered by people around the world, all you need to do is search for the keywords related to your problems, and you’ll likely find something helpful!
• Blender has an official YouTube channel, where it posts tutorials related to various functions and videos about the latest releases and features.
• There are a number of amazing Blender-related YouTube channels like Blender Guru, CG Geek, tutor4u, Ducky3D, and YanSculpts. All you need to do is search “Blender” and start learning!